I was going to make this post a fully functioning joke poll — with radio buttons and a way to submit your results — but that seemed so immature. The constructive role that Iran is playing in the United Nations is actually very serious business — we’re obviously entering an era of multilateral cooperation the likes of which only Susan Rice can comprehend — so that would have been inappropriate.
So consider this a somewhat serious question. Now that Iran is a member of the Commission on the Status of Women, where else is it going to pitch in around the UN (assuming it has any time left over between its responsibilities and systematically raping female political prisoners before killing them)? Some preliminary ideas:
- The International Maritime Organization, because Iran’s ability to deploy naval assets in new and particularly efficient ways is impressive.
- The International Telecommunication Union, because who knows more about cell phones, Internet services, and miscellaneous ICT than the Islamic Republic?
- The World Tourism Organization, because that’s something it knows about boosting even after destroying non-Islamic landmarks.
- The International Atomic Energy Agency, because obviously.
- The United Nations Children’s Fund, because in addition to state-sanctioned rape, it also has state-sanctioned childhood sexual slavery, and I’d make that into a joke, but it’s literally true and stomach-turning.
The administration, and especially Ambassador Rice, insisted that we’d be able to “shape” the UN if we joined execrable groups like the Human Rights Council. That was always a little bit absurd, since the premise — that we won’t have credibility until we crawl into the mud with ruthless despots and hysterical anti-Semites — never quite coalesced.
The argument for joining the HRC couldn’t have been that we would numerically outvote the member dictatorships, since they can and do vote in blocs to protect each other. And it couldn’t have been that we needed to physically be “in the room” to lobby members on specific policies, since we know how to contact ambassadors once they step “out of the room.” If the argument was anything, it was that engaging the UN would give everyone a warm feeling.
That’s obviously an insipid pretense, and it’s always obviously been an insipid pretense, and now Iran is on the Commission on Status of Women. We don’t seem to be doing much “shaping.”
